Prof. Dr. Christine Abbt
Humanities, Social and behavioural sciences
Languages, Social and behavioural sciences
Field: Literary and Cultural Studies. Specialization: South African literature and culture; South African cultural history and historiography; postcolonial studies; global modernism; apartheid; transnational cultural circulation; decolonization, ecocriticism, anthropocene studies.
My current research interests are directed at two core clusters.
In the wake of a successful ERC project, APARTHEID-STOPS on the global circulation of anti-apartheid expressive culture, I continue to research South African literary and cultural historiography in transnational settings.
At the same time, I am laying the basis for a new research project that explores the interface between speculative fiction in the global South and the "anthropocene turn" in the humanities and social sciences. It seeks to chart an emergent corpus of speculative texts emanating from sites (regions, nation-states, cities, conurbations) whose entanglements within, and responses to, vectors of anthropogenic harm and climate crisis have been shaped by the workings of race in the consolidation of modernity.
Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) Award for Best Special Issue in the Social Sciences and Humanities for the year 2001
Award granted to “South Africa in the Global Imaginary,” Special Issue of Poetics Today 22 (2) Summer 2001, Guest editor: Leon de de Kock, co-editors Louise Bethlehem, and Sonja Laden.
English, French, Hebrew
Her translation of Ariella Azoulay’s Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography was published by Verso in 2011.
Bethlehem, L. (2006). Skin Tight: Apartheid Literary Culture and Its Aftermath. xvii +145 Pages. Pretoria: Unisa [University of South Africa] Press; Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV.
Bethlehem, L. and Zalmanovich, T., (eds). (2020). “Celebrity and Protest in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle.” Special edition of Critical Arts: A Journal of South-North Cultural and Media Studies, 34(1), 128 Pages. Taylor and Francis: London and New York.
Bethlehem, L., Dalamba, L. and Phalafala, U., (eds). (2019). “Cultural Solidarities: Apartheid and Itineraries of Expressive Culture,” April 2019. Special edition of Safundi: Journal of South African and American Studies, 20(2). 114 Pages. Taylor and Francis: London and New York.
Helgesson, S., Bethlehem, L., and Han, G. B. (PI), eds. (2018). “Cultural Solidarities: Apartheid and the Anticolonial Commons of World Literature.” 116 Pages. Special edition of Safundi: Journal of South African and American Studies, 19(3). London and New York: Taylor and Francis.
Lahaie, A., Barnai, S. and L. Bethlehem. 2021. “Choreographing Ideology: On the Ballet Adaptation of Peter Abrahams’ _The Path of Thunder_ in the Soviet Union,” in The Cultural Cold War and the Global South: Sites of Contest and Communitas, edited by Kerry Bystrom, Monica Popescu and Katherine Zien, 287-301. London: Routledge.
Bethlehem, L. 2018. “Continuity and Change in Postapartheid Fiction,” Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Literature, Online, 6,000 words. (Invited Article).
Bethlehem, L. (PI), (2022). “Hydrocolonial Johannesburg.” Special Issue: Reading for Water edited by Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery and Sarah Nuttall. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. (Invited article).
Tal, N. (PI) and Bethlehem, L. (PI). 2020. “South African Text; Zionist Palimpsest: Israeli Critics Read Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 19(4): 450-471.
Bethlehem, L. (2018). “Restless Itineraries: Anti-Apartheid Expressive Culture and Transnational Historiography.” Social Text 36 (3 [136]): 47-69.
Bethlehem, L. (2017) “Miriam’s Place”: South African Jazz, Conviviality and Exile,” Social Dynamics 43(2): 243-258,
Bethlehem, L. (2015). “Scratching the Surface: The Home and the Haptic in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City and Elsewhere,” Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa 20(1): 3-23.
Apartheid—The Global Itinerary: South African Cultural Formations in Transnational Circulation, 1948-1990.
European Research Council Consolidator Grant: APARTHEID-STOPS (2014-2019)
This project traces the global diffusion of South African cultural formations, whether textual, musical or visual in a Cold War setting. The apartheid government exiled political activists, intellectuals, writers, photographers and musicians. Texts depicting racial oppression circulated within transnational networks. Images were disseminated by the mass media. Sounds traveled, whether as the radio broadcasts of displaced writers or as the jazz performances of exiled musicians. Cultural mediation is integral to these outward itineraries. Through the lens of cultures of resistance to apartheid, my research team and I seek to explain how South African political dissidents, writers, musicians, artists and photographers frame questions of social justice and racial equality for—and within—other global constituencies.
One year of service on Israel Science Foundation Committee
Active reader for the National Research Foundation of South Africa
Louise Bethlehem sits on the international advisory boards of African Identities, African Studies, Critical Arts: A Journal of South-North Cultural and Media Studies, English in Africa, English Studies in Africa, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Mafte’akh: Lexical Review of Political Thought, Poetics Today: International Journal of Literature and Communication, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, and Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa.
Louise Bethlehem has described herself as a “long-distance South African” in the poet Denis Hirson’s phrase. She maintains an active research presence in South Africa, where she has had a long association with WISER: The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research.
In Israel, she was a member of the original group of scholars who successfully instituted the Inter-University Program in African Studies, presently running between three Israeli universities.
She is the proud mother of two extraordinary young adults, Idan and Maya Shabat.
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Humanities, Social and behavioural sciences
Social and behavioural sciences, Social anthropology, ethnology, sociology
Social and behavioural sciences, Sociology, Social policy, Demography
Languages, Social and behavioural sciences, Modern Chinese Studies / Sinology; Political Science; Political Sociology